Pan-Seared Calamari over Bulgur & Chorizo Hash with Parsley Gremolata—I wish I could cook like this all the time! (I can’t wait until my kids will eat stuff like this…then I will cook more things like this!)
Remember! Signing up and using code AV8W2E will get you $40 off your first box at HelloFresh!
I’ve been thinking about trying HelloFresh for months, so when a friend offered a free box ($60 value), I grabbed it!
I selected the Omnivore box and then selected the meals I wanted, opting against one of the suggested meals because I am not a big artichoke fan:
It’s refrigerated and shipped UPS—you pick what day it’s coming so you know for sure. I was very impressed upon opening the box—everything was superbly packaged and labeled (each meals’ ingredients are bagged together, minus the refrigerated proteins) inside an insulated bag. I was surprised they actually used frozen water bottles instead of dry ice (I tweeted them saying it was cool, and they replied that it was to reduce their carbon footprint) so we got four drinkable bottles of water as well! The three days’ worth of meals arrives in one box.
Once I actually started the meal prep, I was even more impressed—shrimp were peeled and deveined, garlic heads were peeled, everything was the exact amount required (except the red pepper flakes!), and the instructions were beautiful and detailed (I see why it’s as expensive as it is!). For us it’s above budget, but as a treat now and again to try new dishes it’s definitely worth it!
I discovered I like fresh oregano:
Spicy Shrimp ‘Fra Diavolo’ with Garlic Crostini (download recipe):
It was quite good. It wasn’t something I’d likely make regularly but it was a nice change of pace. And I had been worried about portion size, but Tom and I had a full meal and even had some leftover!
If anyone is interested, using my personal code AV8W2E will get you $40 off your first box! (I also get a $20 discount on a future box.) I definitely recommend trying at least one box as it’s definitely worth it for $20. There are no minimum purchases, you can postpone up to three months of future deliveries, and you can cancel at any time. They also send you a reminder email on the last day of meal selection to make sure you have either picked the meals you want or paused that week’s delivery. Of course they’re hoping you will get sucked in, and I can easily see how that would happen—I only planned on getting this one box, but I find myself looking ahead at the upcoming recipes to see what’s being offered…and drooling. 🙂
I can’t wait to make the other two meals!!
Yes, we buy frozen meat from someone’s van! We’ve done it for ~14 years now across every PCS move and have NEVER once been unhappy!
LET’S GET GRILLING!!
We decided to have pizza for dinner and I found a place that had BLT pizza (I haven’t found one in years!). I loved their pizza slogan!
Some background…
I love having friends over for dinner. I like making new friends. So when I read this article last year—
Friday Night Meatballs: How to Change Your Life With Pasta (if you have the time to read it, please do!)—it hit a nerve and I immediately knew it was something I wanted to attempt. I promised myself that I would schedule something after the holiday season had settled down. Well, then life happens, and I didn’t actually get to schedule it until the end of January, with the dinner to be mid-February.
I posted the following invitation on Facebook and hoped for some responses:
Imagine my surprise when the RSVP slots were filled in less than 24 hours!! And lots more people LOVED the idea and promised future participation! 🙂
Unfortunately, the weather didn’t play nice and we had to postpone a week, but the original attendees were all still able to come! And everything went awesome! Six guests (plus kids) was just right. (This house is big, but for a dinner party, six guests is about the limit of dining space. I wish we had more room, or even a good place for another table!) Everyone got along and had a good time talking, the kids were all awesome (Owen had a new Lego buddy and Katie had a friend), and everyone stayed much later than I anticipated (they all left about 9:30). One couple said it was a great idea and they are thinking about starting something similar! Yay! During the event, I even stopped Tom and told him that I was very happy. He agreed it was a good night. 🙂 We both can’t wait to do it again!
Even though it wasn’t BUSY or lots of work, we were both kept busy visiting and prepping and whatnot, so I didn’t take pictures! The only one I took was of the kids’ table:
And this one was snapped by a guest (everyone liked the aquarium but the girls loved it!):
I hope all future dinners go as smoothly as this one did! 🙂
And then, even though it was WAY past the kids’ bedtimes, we let them stay up to watch one TV show to let them calm down. And this happened:
Monday: Holiday
Tuesday: Snow Day
Wednesday: Snow Day
Thursday: School! Yay!
Friday: Snow Day
Friday at 5:30—I’m surprised it wasn’t much, much earlier:
We generally skip celebrating Valentine’s Day, but sometimes we celebrate our day-we-started-dating day instead…which is today! Eighteen years!
We wanted to have dinner out with friends and tonight just happened to work best. They took us to a well-reviewed Korean place by their house. It has been freezing, hence my Eskimo-level parka!
The menu was huge and confusing for us inexperienced gringos. 🙂 We ended up ordering a “meal for two” (with lobster and a few types of bulgogi) that the waitress said would be enough for three, so we also ordered a noodle dish and a few sushi rolls. Then they brought (what we later learned were) the condiment dishes…and the cooking vessel…and we were quickly out of room on the table. And then they brought the noodles and sushi boat and the plate of raw bulgogi! We had plates stacked everywhere!
We weren’t sure what was in all the dishes—or how exactly we were supposed to use them—so we were all cautiously tasting bites of everything, laughing that everyone was probably laughing at us for eating stuff out of order. (For example, one of the platters was lettuce. And it looked like one of the dishes was a ginger-type dressing. We wondered if we were supposed to make a salad?) As it turned out, we were supposed to make lettuce wraps and all the little round dishes were things to put inside the wraps!
Cutting up the lobster:
Overall we had too much food—though we managed to eat it all of course! But it was all delicious and we were glad we got to try a wide variety!
He did about three scoops and he was done. 🙂
He said we had to put out five cookies because that’s what we did last year. I asked if he was sure. He went over and pointed to the picture (on the calendar) of Christmas Eve (which is the picture of him with Santa’s cookies last year) and yep, five cookies. 🙂 I should know not to doubt his memory.
The kids love pizza and they love cupcakes, so I thought they’d love pizza cupcakes! And it was a fun little dinner project.
It went pretty well…
After three she was DONE. So it was Owen’s turn!
He wasn’t thrilled. And neither one liked them.
FAIL.
Since I had help, I made a triple batch of spaghetti sauce. This is what 9# of meat looks like at the beginning…
And this is before the simmer…
Owen wanted to go out and wait so I let him by himself. But then Katie wanted to go with Owee so Tom went out with them. Owen gets SO excited it’s crazy.
Unfortunately we were out of the right vodka so I had to take my new car on my maiden voyage to ABC. 🙂
Thirteen years ago tonight we were eating our post-wedding Chinese dinner…
At first glance, the pantry sucked. It was pretty small plus has angles in it.
But!
With the addition of some door shelving…
And time spent filling it up…
We actually have quite a bit of room! I’ve actually been able to bring stuff in from the Dharma Garage Pantry—and still have room!
Of course there will be some fine-tuning…but for now it’s good.
After the group photo, he commandeered the tripod to use as a cannon…and then actually as a tripod and was pretending to take pictures.
Sitting by the fire!
Not a bad spur of the moment family picture!
Making s’mores!
Eating s’mores—or in Katie’s case, eating the chocolate bar off the graham cracker.
We decided to have a going away party before we left—but I called it an “Until We Meet Again” party because I HATE goodbyes. It was also a perfect excuse to rent a huge waterslide for Owen because he loves them and our new house has zero place for one.
As it was being set up, the kids were VERY excited watching out the window. Katie was saying “Slide! Katie slide! Katie slide please!” 🙂 I was busy getting the last few things ready for the party and Tom was running our last errands so I made the kids wait until he got home…but then it was game on! Owen had no issues with it, of course, but Katie was a poop. She loves climbing on things but put her on the slide where she HAS to climb (and can pretty much climb without much caution) and she wanted NONE of it. This is where she’d stop:
Even after Owen went down a few times, this is the farthest she’d go:
Finally I had enough of trying to verbally coerce her into climbing up, so I got on the slide with her and basically pushed her up each rung of the ladder. Once we got to the top, she didn’t want to go down…so I put my arm around her and we went down together—AND SHE LOVED IT! And immediately went to the ladder…and climbed up all on her own (the little shit!)! I did go up again behind her to make sure she didn’t slip backwards, but she did it just fine!
And then at the top of the slide…I realized my phone was still in my pocket!!! @$&#%! I obviously hadn’t planned on going on the slide (I was still wearing clothes, too) but got caught up in the moment of being frustrated with Katie. 🙁 I yelled at Tom to come get it and instead of coming up the ladder calmly, he was a bit upset and wasn’t being careful…and instead tried to come up over the side of the slide and pulled a leg muscle while getting back off. Like pulled it badly enough that he was limping. 🙁 But the slide was a blast and I knew I’d be on it more throughout the day…so I just gave in and put my suit on right then. And since Katie was still going up and down, I put her in her suit, too.
This is where she liked playing the most. And she was pretty good about moving out of the way when you said “Katie, watch out!” She’d go wait on the side until Owen came down, then she’d go back in the water. 🙂
Even though the slide was fun, I thought it might be out to kill me. After the kids had been playing for a bit (while I was working on party prep), Katie refused to come down (it was her naptime but she didn’t know that—she was just being stubborn). I told Owen this was his one chance to push his sister down the slide—and he tried but he said she was too strong and he couldn’t do it…so I had to go up the slide again to get her down. So I climbed up and we came down together—and I smashed right through the end buffer and landed on the ground with Katie on top of me! HOLY CRAP. I knew it was possible (other adults have done it before) but I had already gone down “successfully” a handful of times so definitely wasn’t expecting it. Katie wasn’t hurt (or crying) so that was good, and for the most part I was okay, but I had actually smacked my head on the ground. Ugh—instant headache. Then Katie was trying to get back onto the slide so I had to grab her…and I slipped on the wet tarp while carrying her! Thankfully she wasn’t hurt and I wasn’t really, either, though my butt and back hurt. Good times, right? I handed her off to Tom and took some pain pills. AND THEN…I was going down the slide with Owen and we were having a blast…and he was excited and wasn’t following the rules (waiting for the area to be clear before sliding down) and just rammed his feet straight into my side. Needless to say it was time for me to take a break.
Once the other kids arrived, things got a little more hectic. Pool toys came out and were part of the slide and kids were going down together (as you can see here)…and the “rules” kind of went out the window. 🙂
The girls loved Katie and basically thought she was their own little doll. 🙂
Ursula was the first adult to go down and she went tandem with Virginia! She agreed it was a blast!
Everyone had fun and the slide was (of course) a hit. There were a few minor bumps and bruises once all eight kids were on the slide at the same time and Owen ended up with a sure-to-be bruised eye. But it was super fun and it all went really well. The only minor bummer was the weather—in the middle of the party we had a downpour just long enough and with just enough thunder and lightning to send everyone inside…for 15 minutes! So then it was back outside! It started to threaten a storm again about 7:00 which sucked because all the adults were going to get on the slide (and I had planned on being able to use the slide most of the evening)…so we just sent the kids inside and a few of us went down a few times in the rain. There’s even video of me catapulting over the end (which may get posted privately) but I’ll gladly post the one of Tom! 🙂
Once it started storming and we were all inside, the kids were watching a movie and the adults were visiting and snacking…and Jacqueline was doing my dishes. There was plenty of room in the dishwasher but she actually LIKES doing dishes so who am I to stop her? 🙂
It was a really great time and I am so glad we did it…and it wasn’t until everyone was gone that I got really sad thinking about how much we’re going to miss everyone. (It’s always sad leaving, but the last time we left, we were just going to be missing two families…this time, we have more friends that we’ll be missing so it will be even harder.) But at least we have some great memories!
We had our good friends over tonight for dinner…fun, because we love them and always have a great time…but kinda sad because it will be one of the last times before we move again.
Owen’s light sabers get everyone involved:
And the guys—missing the third musketeer who is currently deployed.
I had zero energy yesterday so I made up for it today. Among other kitchen duties like emptying the dishwasher, reloading it, and cleaning up…I made my first batch of pesto!
And salmon schmear. Mmm.
Katie even liked it. 🙂
Tonight we had our first homemade bruschetta with the basil from our garden!
Nothing intensive…just a quick sugar cookie bag mix that I got on clearance at Target. I figured that was our speed. 🙂
I gave Owen the option of making colored cookies and he wanted blue (his favorite color)!
After we finished the first tray, there was still a bit left, so Owen made these four—“One for each of us!” 🙂
Passing the time, waiting for the cookies to bake.
Enjoying the spoils!
I tried to channel my mom to make stock from the turkey carcass… I checked with her and she said I did pretty good (onions, garlic, carrot, peppercorns). I knew I was missing celery (no celery seed even!) and she said she’d use a bay leaf. Maybe next time. 🙂
Tom got a smaller—electric—deep fryer for our turkeys. We just don’t use the big one enough anymore. It was delicious.
Pulling recipes out of sheet protectors in a 3-ring binder. Ditching most of them and scanning a few to Evernote.
But the best part was finding all of the recipes from friends and family that I’d asked for at my wedding shower that I’d since lost track of!!
The first dinner Tom cooked for me—a week after we met in February 1997—at my mom’s house in Grayling. I drove over from Traverse and he drove up from MSU. Neither one of us can remember what he cooked (it looks like maybe chicken?) but I’m laughing at three types of alcohol on the table.
I asked Siri to remind me to start the chicken. I like what she heard better.
And as it turned out, I should have listened…as that’s about the time my day started going to shit.
“Siri, I’m an hour late…please forgive me. I should have listened.” 🙂
Dinner for the Mitchell’s since Ursula is really sick, dinner for us one day this week, and one for the freezer!
The bonus is that I used five [heavy glass] jars of spaghetti and Alfredo sauce that we don’t have to move!
One hour in a 126° circulating hot water bath then one minute per side in a screaming hot pan with a butter/oil mix and seasonings.
Mmmmm.
I am loving my Sansaire that I got via Kickstarter!
There’s just something about having Tom home, a nice breeze blowing through the open windows, music playing, having a drink, and getting dinner ready together…to make things seem just about perfect.
It’s a long story, but yes, that’s a smoothie in a bread bowl at Panera.
Katie had fun wandering and climbing.
